Conceptual design and numerical study on a cable-based energy dissipating system for the vibration reduction of tower-like structures

Abstract Tower-like structures have been extensively applied in a variety of infrastructures and facilities such as wind turbines, TV towers, and chimneys. These structures, acting as important loading bearing components, are inevitable to operate in harsh environment, which may result in harmful vibrations. Being different from the existing techniques on vibration reduction, a novel energy dissipating system is proposed in this study by employing cables in order to transfer the bending deformation of the tower into the rigid motions of the cable extremities. The energy is then dissipated by the connected damper placed on the ground. In the present work, the effect of the cable-based energy dissipating system (CEDS) is firstly studied by means of an analytical model, indicating that the damping of the whole system can be greatly increased at an optimal damping coefficient of the damper. Based on the finite element (FE) formulation, a customized damping element, which allows to simulate the behavior of the CEDS along the tower, is next derived and included into the self-developed toolbox of finite element analysis (TFEA). Lastly, a wind turbine tower modeled in TFEA is taken for a case study. From the time-domain analysis, it has been verified that the response of the wind turbine can effectively be reduced when equipped with the proposed energy dissipating system, confirming the potential of its application for broader cases in the field of tower-like structures.